Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

Do Judgments Screen Evidence? 242
Not all of these views depend on JSE, but they’re all supported in ways that I think
rely on JSE. And some of them, mostly clearly the first, seem to be false if JSE is false.
So JSE is deeply implicated in an important branch of contemporary epistemology.
Yet JSE is false, as the last three sections have shown. This suggests that many of the
positions on this branch have to be rethought.
The failure of JSE suggests a kind of externalism, though not of the traditional
kind. It does not suggest, or at least does not require, that evidence be individuated
in ways in principle inaccessible to the agent. It does not suggest, or at least does
not require, that the force of evidence be determined by contingent matters, such as
the correlation between evidence of this type and various hypotheses. But it does
suggest that there are facts about which hypotheses are supported by which pieces
of evidence, and that rational agents do well when they respond to these epistemic
facts. Moreover, it suggests these facts retain their normative significance even if the
agent has reason to believe that she’s made a mistake in following them. That is, if
an agent’s judgment conforms to the correct norms of judgment, then even if she has
evidence that she is not good at judging, she should stick to her judgment. In such a
case she could not defend her judgment without appeal to the evidence that judgment
is based on. But that’s not a bad position to be in; judgments should be defensible by
appeal to the evidence they’re based on.